Ayesongs Blog

After many long months on the road to and from Glasgow, my daughter’s hospital treatments are at an end and she’s doing very well, thank you. Being back at home base most of the time means that I can get down to work on the comics and illustrations with the odd side-project making music with Arbelos.

Gail Scott continues and I intend to complete ‘As Mars Turns’ shortly. The last issue of that story should go live around the end of September. I’m also starting some work for NCS making cover illustrations for their ‘Curious About…’ series of self-help Kindle books. This is a new field for me but I’m bringing what I’ve learned making the Gail Scott Kindle books to this new venture. The trick with Kindle covers is that the image must look attractive on the Kindle Store website, but also look good when viewed on a Kindle ereader too. I’m working on a colour art style that will gracefully collapse into contrasty shades of grey in a Kindle with the intention of creating Gail Scott 4 that way. The covers will make good material for me to try this out and perfect the method before applying it to the tight schedule of a webcomic.

Musically Arbelos has restarted work on the new album ‘Stone Owl On The Shore’ and Alex and I have started to work on the percussion and bass for a song called ‘The Cry.’ This is one of Noel’s and is fairly downbeat. To balance that we’ve srpuced up an old one of mine called ‘Forest Glades’ which is full of happy cosmic hippy stuff. Other songs in the pipeline include a bit of ancient Celtic legend with an environmental twist, a Hebridean fairy story and a bit of SF from a leading Scottish writer. Something should emerge blinking into the download stores by Christmas.